There has been a recent trend to change connections to broadband customer premises equipment from a point-to-point protocol over Ethernet (PPPoE) to a dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) in order to access features and management capabilities provided by DHCP functionality. Typically, the customer premises equipment is configured to establish either a PPPoE connection or a DHCP connection. This may cause unnecessary delay and frustration when the customer premises equipment attempts to acquire a network connection using an unavailable protocol.